Month: June 2019

Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member. What better way to celebrate the 4th of July could there be than attending a production of 1776, the 1969 Tony Award-winning musical about the signing of the Declaration of Independence? This is especially true when it is a good production, and director Wayne Mell’s MadKap […]

Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Joe Mazza, Bravelux. Lauren Gunderson capitalized on the huge popularity of her Miss Bennett: Christmas at Pemberley to become the most produced playwright in America for 2017, and now she has returned with another uncannily articulate and intelligent heroine in Ada Byron Lovelace, daughter […]

Review by Kelly MacBlane At some point during the second act of Victory Gardens Theater’s production of If I Forget, I realized I had somewhere along the way lost track of the fact that I was sitting in a theater attending a play. Instead, I felt as if I was sitting in a chair in […]

Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Austin D. Oie Photography. John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, now playing in Theo Ubique’s new theatre on Howard Street, is funny, poignant, crude, and never anything less than enjoyable. From the moment when punk rocker Hedwig enters the […]

Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Austin D. Oie Photography . It’s both simple and impossible to state exactly what The River is all about. The short, enigmatic 2012 play by Jez Butterworth (whose The Ferryman just won the Tony Award) is, at least on its surface, about a man […]

Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Michael Courier. Religious televangelists, with their megachurches, their jets, their nine-figure incomes, and (sometimes) their hypocrisy unveiled for all of their congregations to see, are such a ripe topic for satire that it’s almost amazing that Anthony Tournis was able to write his comedy […]

Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Evan Hanover . In The Ballad of Lefty and Crabbe, now playing at the Underscore Theatre, two talented vaudeville performers find themselves out of a career when, with the advent of talking films, vaudeville opportunities dry up completely. Desperate for any chance to keep […]

Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Michael Brosilow. In a cynical world, fame can be a fleeting thing. One minute you are the talk of the town, and the next minute someone else comes along and your story is old hat. Though I could easily be referring to 2019, this […]

Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Heather Mall. According to Artemisia Theatre, Sweet Texas Reckoning is a comedy, but you’d have to pardon audiences for not picking up the humor in this powerful production of Traci Godfrey’s play about familial relations, bigotry, and the coming out of a gay woman […]

Review by Karen Topham, American Theatre Critics Association member; photo by Austin Oie. In 2012, an anonymous Russian activist/punk rock group that called itself Pussy Riot made headlines around the world by performing a 48-second “punk prayer” called “Virgin Mary, Chase Putin Away!” in the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Though they were […]